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Customizing OS X - Part 4 of 5 (finally) |
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 As was mentioned Before Part's 4 and 5 of my customizing OS X article would be delayed because of hardware problems. Well, I finally got most of my information on a new hard drive, and I am going to post 4 & 5 today and tomorrow. So if you are new to this series, I strongly suggest starting from the beginning. But if you have read 1-3, then here ya go!
Today's customization is a little less Mac OS, and a little more X. X-tream that is!
{Lights go down, loud music starts. A few seconds go by, and the light show begins. Four guys on dirt bikes come flying out of different corners, each one gunning towards one ramp in the middle. One biker makes it. The others perish in shame. Then...the credits}
I am sorry for that, I got a little carried away there...
But seriously folks, I can only do so much customizing of the Mac OS itself. Today we are going to focus on the one app that I think most of us use more than any other iApp. No, not iTunes, that gets played, and then minimized...Oh, no, we are going straight to the big time. Safari!
| We are going to customize Safari, mainly because we all use it a lot, but also because there are not that many parts of the OS, and Safari seemed cool. So let's start with Safari Enhancer. At my last count there were about 367 kajillion different programs to remove Safari's metal interface, and Safari Enhancer does that. But it also turns on a debugging menu, removes link underlines, uses custom link colors, imports bookmarks from other browsers, and more. |
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After we have removed the metal interface, we have Safari looking like this:
I don't know about anyone else, but if there's one thing I hate more than anything, it's starting Safari and only having part of the screen covered. When I open an app, I want it to take up the screen. For that, we turn to Full Screen Safari. It's another APE module so, as described in part 1, you need to have APE Manager installed. "Full Screen Safari" is a simple program. It just makes Safari windows open in full screen. That's it, no settings - nothing. It just does it, and asks for nothing. You could learn a lesson from this program.
| Another program that changes Safari, is Lioness. Again, you can remove Safari's brushed metal look, but more importantly you can change the look of the tool bar buttons. I am going to go with an Emerald theme, to accentuate both Safari, and the os itself. Just select that from the Lioness preferences, and click install. That's it. |
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The last customization we are going to do fits right in the "why didn't we think of this?" category. In the "International" System Preference Pane, under the "Input Menu" tab there is an option for Character Palette. Put a check in that, and now you have a new menu in the menu bar.
Click on that new menu, and click on "Show Character Palette" Now you have a window will all kinds of weird stuff in it. But if you choose "All" from the "View" pull down list, and select something like "Dingbats" or "Miscellaneous Symbols" you can now add symbols to anything you can put text in, including the bookmarks bar. See where I am going with this?
| Using the same philosophy as we used on the desktop, I am going to say you probably have all kinds of bookmarks you want quick access to, but do not want to take up that much space. And again, like the dock, a folder would be very handy, but unlike the dock, you don't have to have a 2-button mouse to enjoy this. Just open up the bookmarks folder by clicking that icon up in the left corner of safari. Then under bookmark bar, add a folder. For the name of this folder, go ahead and choose a symbol from the Character Palette, and click insert. Now add bookmarks at will, and you suddenly have a cool bookmark bar. |
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Plus, if you use tabbed browsing, you can Command-click any of the folder links in the bookmark bar, and Safari will automatically open all the web sites in that folder in different tabs.
Well, that is it for today. Tomorrow, we get back to customizing the OS with the menu bar. Until then, I leave you with a link to part 5, and screen shot after todays customizations, just to make the dames happy:
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July 31 2003, 12:37 PM EDT, by
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Comments:
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| Jonahan |
7/31/03, 6:10 PM EDT |
I knew you could remove the metallic skin from Safari, but I always kind of liked it. After seeing your screenshots though, I just had to give Safari that Aqua look....very nice :)
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| Jonahan |
8/5/03, 8:51 AM EDT |
Ok, every once in a while I get on a kick of customizing things, but for the most part I let my desktop stagnate and be the same for long periods of time. iKen's articles have prompted me to look around for mods and stuff....so I went to ResExcellence as the great iKen suggested and found some cool Safari "hacks".
Here's a pic of what my copy of Safari looks like:
Here's where you can get these images and more like them:
http://www. resexcellence.com/user_safari.shtml
:)
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